Pop-up menus have become common place in computer applications. A pop-up menu may be created in SUN MICROSYSTEMS INC.'s JAVASCRIPT™ and is executed by a web browser. Usually, these menus “pop-up” when the user's mouse or pointing device is positioned over a certain screen image or position. It is common to insert these pop-up menus in web pages and/or application servers at a central location, for example a host web server. Web users will then be able to access the web pages with the pop-up menus thereon by accessing the central location to download the web page or the transferable portions of an application server.
A web page or script which is to be downloaded from one site (host) to user's site (target) is typically downloaded, perhaps using the Internet, under control of the target user's Internet browser. In this situation it is desirable for the host site web page to be established using any combination of SUN MICROSYSTEMS INC.s JAVA™ code, JAVASCRIPT™, HTML, XML, and the like. JAVASCRIPT™ is a high level scripting language that uses a similar syntax as JAVA™, although it is not compiled into bytecode on the client. JAVASCRIPT™ is not as powerful as JAVA™, which is a full-blown programming language, but is much easier to use than JAVA™. However, JAVASCRIPT™ still requires familiarity by the user in order to adequately program or script web page material. Thus, the creator of the web page at the host site must have an understanding of JAVASCRIPT™ coding as well as graphics if he/she is to be able to create documents as the host site which, when downloaded to a target computer, will allow the user to roll his/her mouse over images or text in that document and have associated pop-up menus appear. These pop-up menus provide the user additional information, options, or links to additional information, optionally controlled by the target user. Even though JAVASCRIPT™ is easier to use than JAVA™, the document creator at the host site still needs to be fluent in JAVASCRIPT™ and HTML which means that technically trained people are required to setup these documents. This creates a bottleneck, delays implementation and is costly.